New Home Sales

Single-family home construction declines are accelerating

New-home sales have been a relative bright spot in an otherwise stagnant housing market. But that’s changing and homebuilders recognize it. According to June 2025 data released Friday by the U.S. Census Bureau, single-family home construction is down year over year at every stage of the process. This includes permits (-8.4%), starts (-10%), completions (-15.5%) […]

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Housing inventory growth: Good for buyers, bad for builders

Housing inventory growth has been a blessing for the existing home sales market, cooling price growth and giving homebuyers a bit more advantage in 2025. However, as we all know, the inventory growth has been detrimental to the homebuilders this year. On Monday, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, posted on X about the

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US housing construction is dead with current mortgage rates

New home sales missed sales estimates significantly in Wednesday’s report and we have negative revisions to the previous months. The builders’ profit margins are dwindling, which means housing construction, which has been at early COVID-19 recession levels for some time, could worsen if mortgage rates stay elevated or head even higher. So, instead of focusing

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Homebuilders have no motivation to grow permits with 7% rates

Even though new home sales showed growth last month, the homebuilders — both big and small — have no desire to grow housing permits or starts with 7% mortgage rates. Housing starts and permits peaked in 2022 and have been fluctuating at levels similar to the early stages of the COVID-19 recession for some time

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How to think about home prices for the rest of 2025

The story for the housing market over the past three years has been, “Home sales are down, home prices are up.” Because inventory was so restricted after the pandemic, prices pushed higher even as demand weakened. That story may finally be inverting as unsold inventory of homes is now great enough that home prices are

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Why did we just see the highest new home sales print in years?

I know this is a crazy stat, given how much the builders’ confidence is falling, but new home sales just had the highest monthly sales print in years. Can this be revised lower in the future? Yes, just like the previous months have been. But there’s a bigger story here that I’ll address because this

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Buyers shrug off economic uncertainty as new-home sales rise

New-home sales continue to be a bright spot in a housing market that’s struggling with high mortgage rates and other economic headwinds. According to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), new homes in April sold at seasonally adjusted annual rate of 743,000, which is a

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Inventory back to 2019 levels and what that means for 2025

To start things off, I have an announcement to make, today will be my last weekly article for Altos Research. I founded Altos nearly 20 years ago to bring a new level of analytics and data to the housing market. Two and a half years ago, Altos was acquired by HousingWire, and it’s been tremendously

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